Chatfor10 & I

At Startup Weekend I attended in November, I connected with the founder of Neon King Kong, the company behind Chatfor10. The app aims to make it easier for refugees and people seeking asylum to practice communicating in a language they are learning. Chatfor10 is essentially a designed to facilitate English microlearning. Chatfor10 is getting a fair bit of traction and recognition, having been recently accepted into Impact Boom's Elevate+ Accelerator Program.

Right now the learners and volunteers are just using Whatsapp. But Whatsapp is a cumbersome, manually intensive to administer and restrictive. In other words, Chatfor10 needs to be its own app and that's where I come in.

I have joined the Chatfor10 development team to help develop the Neon King Kong platform, which has ambitions beyond Chatfor10, as well as the Chatfor10 microlearning app. The grand vision is that Chatfor10 will be the first learning app off the Neon King Kong assembly line. If it is successful, other apps will be added to both support Chatfor10 and expand the learning services offered by Neon Kong Kong. For me personally, I am approaching this as a learning opportunity. I am looking forward to the challenge involved with being part of the Neon King Kong development team!

Techstars Startup Weekend Brisbane 2018

This weekend, around the world, TechStars Startup Weekend is back on. This weekend was targeted towards women, although it is not exclusive to women. Men could come along and join if they wanted. I am not taking part, but I did turn up for Friday night initial pitches. I also gave a pitch, but I didn't do any recruiting for canvased for votes obviously. I mostly enjoyed listening to the pitches.

So where the pitches different from the Startup Weekend in November? Not as much as I thought they would be. There were three extremely similar pitches for fashion related startups that centered around customisation and ethical fashion. There were a few start-up ideas around caregiving, including ideas about making elderly parents more comfortable with technology. However, what surprised me were how many startup ideas centred around financial education and financial freedom. There were, however, no obvious winning ideas among the pitches.

What I mean is that during the November Startup Weekend, it was pretty obvious that the Pegasus Equine Management was a slam dunk unless something went wrong. The idea got the most votes, was the biggest team and it was obvious the lady who pitched already knew going in that there was a market for it. Most importantly, she already had the contacts to break into the market if she could just get a product together. The only idea that approached Pegasus, in terms of known gap in the market and industry connection, this time around was "Florist Connect", but it just didn't have the traction among those who were attending.

Anyway, I handed my card to a few people who I thought I could collaborate with in the future but I am not sure if anything will come of it. It probably would have been better if I could stick around and taken part but between travelling for much of January and a recent bout of illness, I didn't feel I would have the energy to contribute effectively. But I have already signed up for the March Startup Weekend, which has a focus on creativity, including IoT. So I think it might be a good venue to pitch some of my wearable ideas.

Nura Headphones: Personalised Sound!

Back in July 2016, I backed Nura Headphones on Kickstarter. I finally got my headphones and I love it! I have never been much of an audiophile and strangely, that's why I was attracted to these headphones. I mean, the best pair of headphones I had before Nura were SoundMAGIC E30 in-ear headphone. They were great but I always wondered if I was getting the best sound possible out of them because I suck at equalization. I usually just go with presets but I also don't bother changing the presets. Finally, I was concerned about hearing degradation as I aged. Nura seemed to be a great answer to all my concerns.

Nura uses a frequency based test to map my ear and then provides me with a personalised hearing profile that is designed to help me hear as much of the music as possible. So I don't have to worry about equalization and in theory, if I run the test annually, I can keep hearing well even as my ears change with age. So for me, it was a good buy at the Kickstarter price. Especially since I didn't already have expansive high-end Headphones. The SoundMAGIC E30, while highly rated, ultimately a pair of budget headphones that come in under $50.

However, the professional reviews for Nura have been more mixed. A lot of people prefer the build in equalization of other high-end headphones to Nura's personal profile. Some people also prefered other people's profiles to their own. I can understand to an extent. I tried listening using my mom's hearing profile and the music was louder. I know that when I couldn't decide what sounded best, I just went with whichever equalization setting sounded louder. My brother also got a pair of Nura and I would be keen to see how music sounds with his and my sister-in-law's sound profile.

As for the sound profiles, I ran the test on my phone ears three times and while the colouring changed, the overall shape of my hearing graph was consistent. It was also different from those of my mom, brother and sister-in-law. Other Nura owners have posted their profiles on Twitter. The variety of profiles is quite something.

Overall, I love the headphones and they were the right buy for me. For others, the price might not be worth it. Alternatively, they might already have high-end headphones that they already like. But I am glad I backed Nura Headphones!

Codebots: Build code with the help of AI

Last week, I kept up my pattern of going to random events that show up on my Eventbrite recommendation page. So I found myself at the Festive Founders Mingle and Jingle, which was hosted by Brisbane AI and included a talk by Dr Eban Escott, the founder of Codebots.

Codebots is an AI that, as the name suggests, writes code with the particular focus on "low-code".

From their website, "Codebots is on a mission to help humans team up with code-writing bots to plan, design, build and launch awesome software to the cloud. We are a Brisbane-based technology startup taking on the global giants in the billion dollars low-code industry. On the platform, 92.68% (on average) of the software’s code is written by a codebot and the remaining percentage is completed by a human. Collaborating with a codebot means quicker software delivery times, higher quality applications but most importantly, the team spends less time coding and more time creating."

Codebots is an interesting concept. I mean, Scala was developed to cut down on the number of lines of code you had to write in Java. Certainly, there is nothing fun about writing 90% of the codebase since it's pretty generic and bog standard. So this certainly has potential but it also begs the question if the recent focus on pushing students towards STEM is a good idea. The future of works is complex and codebots shows that AI will disrupt software engineering the same way it is disrupting every other industry.

For my part, I have signed up for the codebots beta. I hope I am selected because it sounds like a fun thing new skill to learn. Besides, AI co-workers do not smell.

Reekoh

I have been a member of IoT Brisbane Meetup for months now but I have not been able to get out of actually attend one of their sessions. This week finally, I dropped into their joint session with Mobile Monday to hear Dale Rankine speak about his experience with Reekoh.

It was interesting and insightful talk. It touched on the fact that some form the "things" that make up the Internet of Things has been around for decades now. However, the industry as a whole is still maturing with integration being an area that's lacking. Reekoh's platform addresses part of the issue, focusing on ingesting, storing and providing some analysis. But there is still room to expand.

It actually got me thinking about a platform for IoT but about you. There are a ton of wearables on a market that are designed to measure things about our body. But after the initial hyped died down, most of the wearable companies are suffering. Even Fitbit isn't doing as well as they maybe should be. So there might be potential to explore the possibility of bringing together a number of wearables to give a more holistic picture of overall health.  Indeed, looking at the whole picture and not just focusing on individual pieces like increasing activity or being more mindful. I think it is a concept worth exploring.